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"It's one thing to type a few words into your computer. It's a whole other level to actively involve yourself this way."

It's all an extension of a sense of humor and personal world building. I understand that to the average person and people whose familiarity with JG starts with GotG this is all "shocking" but to those who knew him from Tromeo and Juliet on, it fits well into the atmosphere of his world then. It was a very freewheeling attitude of life as a series of absurd, ridiculous, degenerate comic excursions with a specific inner silly logic. Taking strictly the pedophilia related antics out of context, I get why people are shocked, but this stuff is a small part of an overall thing they had going. I've heard he took down the blog but if you can go back through it and if you're willing to be open minded you'll get what I'm talking about. Obviously a lot of it is wicked dark, but willfully so, and never at all serious. This is all a context issue.

"Suppose he went to a party with the theme "To catch a terrorist" (Instead of "To Catch a Predator) and dressed as a middle east Muslim wearing a bomb vest."
That's not really out of the bounds of taste for something he might've done at the time, except for the implied racism. Actually I don't know which is more "offensive", that or a pedophilia party. Either way it's in the spirit of fun and cheekily dark humor. How is it any different from dressing like a serial killer or what have you for halloween? I don't see it as fundamentally any different at all. Neither is actively playing out serious fantasies.

We're looking at all of this through the lens of 2018 #metoo, Trump, SJW, twitter outrage culture, through a magnifying lens, and in context of his working for Disney. The world really was very different then, both for American society at large and for James as a small indie filmmaker in the context of like minded friends and fans. Yes this was in bad taste. That was intentional. It doesn't hold up to scrutiny through a view of what's going on in the world today, but that retroactive scrutiny isn't fair.

In the case of this particular pedophilia themed party there's a certain celebratory mocking of the hypocrisy of the church, and clear satirizing of a situation so ironic that having a laugh over it is a natural reaction, as many have also done. Women, who were once young girls, are also willfully in on the joke and, further JG was not the organizer of this particular shindig.

I don't want to take the bait on these fallacious hypotheticals but the party you're imagining straight up would be offensive to most anyone without more detail, though what if, to get a little closer to equivalency, say, half or more of the guests at said lynching party were black themselves, and that it was conceived as satire in response to specific current events?

my point was that a transgressive sensibility, whether it's in one's humor or wherever, often is tied in with an unhinged creativity.

that doesn't mean that they give the world great pedophile art. it means that skewed sensibilities often cross boundaries, and sometimes they offend, and sometimes they create genius things.

a personal example: i know someone who is probably the only person i've ever known who i could describe as a creative genius. he has a true gift. ideas flow out of him. he can come up with lyrics on the spot. make the most clever, insightful jokes. & he is filthy, often in the most tasteless ways. rape jokes, kiddie porn jokes, all that stuff. he's offended lots of people, but he also draws brilliantly & writes convincingly.

as for gunn, i think slither & super are terrific films, & the two guardian films are among the best mcu movies.
i think he has a real talent.